A month of LibreOffice

Well it’s been an exciting month, and there’s more to come. Not only this blog has known a record high peaks of audience, but I really wanted to show what we are up to these days. Several things are happening and I wish, now that I and my fellow non-Oracle members have resigned from the Community Council of OpenOffice.org, to stop the antics around that question. The fact of the matter is, we have left the OpenOffice.org project, others are leaving as well, and I don’t foresee a lot of people staying after the 3.3 release, which will be the last OpenOffice.org released with the full help of the community. On the other hand, Oracle will not be working with us, and is not interested to do so in their own words. Enough said.

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice are quite a daunting task to achieve; in fact, it’s not just the continuation of the largest code base of Free and Open Source software, which is already something major in itself, it’s the live development of software that’s truly innovative, truly appealing, and exceeding what the users were used to expect before. I have read on GigaOM that LibreOffice was, like OpenOffice.org, a technology of the past, a paradigm of the eighties or the nineties waiting to die. I would not disagree with the notion that our paradigm is old: that’s what Microsoft is realizing, and why it’s freaking out by creating phony videos on YouTube that only helps to highlight the lock-in people experience with Microsoft formats. Yet, LibreOffice is here to stay; as a project, and as a software. After our two betas we are expecting a code freeze by tomorrow or so, and we already have included lots of patches and fixes that will make LibreOffice already different from what you would have expected: a themed OpenOffice.org . More changes will be visible soon.